


collective house filmado real

by grenburr, zack69



Category: The Collective: a Visual Novel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 19:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13933881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grenburr/pseuds/grenburr, https://archiveofourown.org/users/zack69/pseuds/zack69
Summary: You come across a mysterious house while walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. You look through the contents and find a story more interesting than you ever would have expected.





	collective house filmado real

It is a beautiful sunny day in March. It’s cool outside, and you feel perfectly comfortable in your light sweater. You are walking along the sidewalk in an unfamiliar neighborhood, looking for someone to help you bring gas to your car that broke down. You’ve made it a ways away from your car, though. You stop in your tracks when you enter the shadow of a strange-looking house. The outside is painted green, with the shutters a bright yellow. This house has the colorings of a frog. The house is quite small in appearance, but upon opening its burgundy front door, it opens up to a larger space that shouldn’t be physically possible.

 

When you enter through the big front door, the narrow opening is filled with coats, bags, shoes, all sorts of personal belongings. The thirteen residents of this strange house weren’t always the tidiest of people.

 

Walking farther and into the open space, you see a vast living area. There are too many couches, overstuffed armchairs, beanbags, and piles of pillows to properly take in. There are coffee tables with several coasters on them, all with pictures of Pokemon from rather unflattering angles. A TV of a large, bordering on unreasonable size is mounted on the far wall. Stacked on a table under it are two Nintendo Switch consoles, a Playstation 4,  a Nintendo 64 ,  _ and _ a Nintendo Wii, and piles upon piles of various controllers .  And an empty box that once held Fruit Roll-Ups that someone had forgotten to throw away.

 

This house really is strange, but somehow everything about it feels familiar. The colors and textures, the composition of all of the clutter, and the comforting yellowy lighting all exist in a warm harmony. In the far wall, there are two large windows that allow the late-afternoon sun to filter through. There is a large dent in the wall between them. Did someone… fall into the wall? It looks like that was the case. You haven’t met any of these people, neither do you know their names, but you seem to know them in a way. You can kind of get the feel for who some of them are, like how your friends in high school who had way more friends than you talked about their friends’ wild antics. 

 

A little further and through another opening is the spacious kitchen. A large table covered in more coasters takes up a good amount of the room, with the rest devoted to lots of counter space, currently full of mugs from breakfast that morning. There are several band and franchise names emblazoned on the mugs. There’s a huge refrigerator, and some shelves on which sat some fruit and vegetables taken from the garden just outside the back door.  Its counter is lined with various miscellaneous objects, from candles to small plants laid next to the windows, to several framed photos dated throughout the years. Turning to the walls, the photos continue, recognizing different people as they aged from the older photos. The largest frame, centered cozily onto the wall, pictured about thirteen young adults hugging each other dearly, smiling and laughing. One of them had their arms locked around the shoulders of two of their friends, making two peace signs. Compared to the others, their expression was mellow and tired-looking, but despite everything, they smiled as wide as they could, with their friends around them following suit. Gazing down to the edge of the photograph, multiple cursive loops detailed signatures, including messages like “Rowan you stupid fucking furry we all hate you and we hope you die (we love you! <3).”

 

Once you mount a narrow, dark staircase, a hallway stretches in front of you. There are, like, seven doors. Are there really seven bedrooms in this house? How much is rent here? To your right is the door to the bathroom, cracked slightly open. The inside looks like chaos. The walls of the hallway are covered in pictures. Some are framed, and some are tacked onto one of many bulletin boards. The people who live in this house really love taking pictures. The same people show up again and again, doing every action known to man. You notice an unflattering shot of a tall person with shoulder-length dark hair and red-rimmed glasses with his mouth wide open, about to bite into the cone of chocolate ice cream he’s holding. This one looks like a real bastard. You can feel his obnoxious energy through this small image of him.  To his side, however, the shorter, tired-looking person from before seems to be rushing in to steal this Bastard’s frozen treat. Over and over you see all of the people together, crowded in and smiling. These people look too different to be blood related, but they are obviously the closest family there is.

 

You proceed down the hallway and decide to open the door on the left, the farthest away from the stairs. This bedroom is quite cheery. The walls are painted a warm yellow, and strings of fairy lights hang along side the many posters of various bands on  the walls . There is a bunk bed in the corner next to the door. It’s covered in brightly-colored blankets, pillows, and too many plushes to count. An electric guitar and a bass are on stands side by side,  with an accompanying amp underneath.  There’s a desk along the other wall, strewn with markers and paintbrushes and leaves of drawing paper. Above it is a bulletin board with photos tacked to it. There were people posed in front of famous landmarks, people eating giant hamburgers, and several people making the shape of a “9” with one hand.  Most of them were polaroids, but a few look like they were simply printed from the household printer. You could recognise the people in them from the photos in the kitchen as well as a few that you can recognise from the posters on the wall. A big bookshelf is opposite the bed with a record player and more records than books lining the shelves. At the end of each shelf a few figures, a camera and other various bits and bobs break up the stacks of vinyl records. Among the few books were magazines with once again the same people you recognise from the posters. The final thing you fully take notice of is the large mirror alongside a hanger of fashionable clothing. There was two distinct sides of it, the left with orange coat hangers and the right having red. The room seemed somewhat cluttered but not the messy kind, but in the way that it’s cozy and comforting. 

 

You decide to move on and look at another bedroom. You  _ know _ you’re not supposed to be here. The residents who overcrowd this house are obviously very at home here. To disrupt this household would be to disrupt a collective sense of family. You open the door across from the room you were just in. This room has a completely different atmosphere. The walls are painted a grayish purple, an unfortunate shade that made the walls seem as though they were closing in, until your gaze catches onto blocks of colorful paint, bursting into fiery orange sunrises on a light purple sky. What looked like an ominous atmosphere at first evolved into a colorful environment to be explored-- you notice several other paintings, and many, many tubes of acrylics neatly organized upon a cleaned palette, stained from what looks like months of continuous use. Beneath a rather expansive window lay a generous desk space. Upon it rested a sleek, clean, massive computer monitor, and below it silently blinked an ominous computer tower, tempting strangers to awaken it. As alluring the thought of such a powerful computer being available for your use, you can’t help but feel like… something’s wrong. Shaking your head, you duck and examine the rest of the desk space, where a glowing keyboard pulsed in all of the colors of the rainbow, with multitudes of sketchbooks lined margin to margin with body studies, character references, illustrations, and the occasional… shitty drawing of a penis? Just how OLD were the people living here? Turning around,  there is a bookcase along a wall that is filled with video game cases.  Each shelf is neatly organized so that games for different consoles are placed together, seemingly ancient DS and 3DS games nestled together on one shelf while PC and various console games for the living room’s game systems were collected on another. The upper shelves contained figurines and statues of dragons and mythical beasts, including vicious elemental dragons from a popular series you cannot seem to remember. In another corner is the bed. Piled miles high with blankets, it looks like a burrow of some small furry animal,  with several pillows lined up against the wall and cross each other as if it were lining a nest. Resting on the pillow tops were plushies of marine life, including an old and worn gray shark, and a rotund silver isopod . There is a box of Cheez-Its on the floor next to the bed,  and several unopened bottles of cream soda. An alarm clock on the bedside table has been unplugged.

 

You nod to yourself, and quickly duck out of this room. You decide to look around the rooms and open another door. You stumble into the room and see a normal bed. Albeit it’s messy, because there’s a laptop and a drawing tablet and stylus on the bed, but the tablet and stylus are in their cases -- don’t worry. There are also black-colored headphones unplugged from the laptop and the bed blanket is baby blue, while the bed frame has a cream color. The room is painted rose-gold and there’s also a beanbag slightly afar from the bed. The light from above is just a simple light bulb which has been working for almost 2 years but it’s still working to this day, apparently. Also there’s a bluish-gray-colored bean bag just in case the resident of this room wants to sit down and not hurt her back from sitting on the bed for too long) 

 

You decide to mix it up a bit and head to the beginning of the long hallway.  However, on your way out, your head comes into unfortunate contact with a large metal loop hanging from the ceiling-- easily as thick as 3 fingers. Looking around the apparently empty house just in case, you pull the loop down releasing a comically large staircase. Jesus Christ, who  _ lived  _ here anyways? However, instead of opening into a dank and dusty attic, the space up the stairs was… surprisingly nice. On the North and East walls were two windows, extending from the floor to the ceiling. Where there weren’t windows, there were posters for musical artists you thought died off in 2013-- Lady Gaga, My Chemical Romance, Britney Spears-- teeny shit. Nestled into the corner was a white plastic desk with a large terrarium and a laptop computer on top of it. Turning around, you notice the giant flat-screen TV on the West wall, directly in front of an absolutely massive pile of rock-shaped pillows with various reptile, insect, and marine life-themed plushies strewn in between. There aren’t any gaps between the pillows-- there’s simply too many! After inspecting the room a bit more, you turn around to descend the stairs.

 

The stairs that aren’t there anymore.

 

Before you can get your bearings and try to find a way out, something hits you hard from behind, knocking you onto the floor. Your arms and shoulders are pinned down, while whatever hit you seems to be adjusting you into a more comfortable position-- one that has you facing up.

 

Long, light-green hair with a yellow-gold sheen hangs over you, distorting the face of your attacker. His face looks like the face of any preppy cheerleader type but… Are those antennae coming from the top of his head? Why is he so...   _ Big _ ? You struggle to escape his grip but you don’t have any luck. You manage to shift yourself to get a look behind his head. Your breath catches as you take in what protrudes from his back. It looks like a giant… Crab claw. The claw  _ does _ look more like a pair of pincers, but you have no earthly idea what to call this. He has delicate wings closer to his shoulders. He must have cut holes out of his bright pink sweatshirt for his wings to poke through. If you weren’t absolutely terrified, you would laugh to yourself when you notice he has two graphic block-style eyes printed on the very front of the aforementioned sweatshirt. They are in locations that are either unfortunate or very well-planned.

 

You manage to collect enough breath and strength to yell. “HELP!” You struggle even harder, but to no avail.  The figure leans in closer, breathing hot on your face. For a split second, you think to yourself that you’re going to die here-- that is, until, he pulls back. There’s a slightly confused look in his eyes as he inspects you, taking in every detail over and over again.   
  
“Say, I didn’t hear the word that Rowan was inviting someone new!” Before mulling it over, he slowly realizes that everyone else was out of the house at  Cracker Barrel.   
“ _ Oooooh. _ So you broke in. I see. Dumbass.”

 

You are paralyzed with fear. Who is this… Person? Is he a person? Who is Rowan? You remember seeing the name Rowan on one of the pictures in the kitchen…

 

“Who are you?” The giant humanoid with many characteristics of a crab and a bug stands to his full height. He seems more at ease now, but you still know to be wary.

 

“I’m… I’m (Y/N).”

 

“Huh.” He tilts his head a little to one side. “That’s an interesting name. Sounds like the name of a total normie.”

 

“Thank you…?”

 

“That wasn’t exactly a compliment, but you are very welcome. Listen, (Y/N)... Where are you from? Why are you here?” The creature begins walking around you, sizing you up.

 

You take a breath to answer, but you hear the heavy front door downstairs slam open. The house is suddenly full of boisterous conversation and laughter. “ALEXA, KILL THIS CLOWN!” You hear. The Amazon Echo begins a response, but the laughter explodes again.

 

“LISTEN, ROWAN, I WILL DIE BEFORE I ADMIT THAT I HAVE NIPPLES!”

 

“Zachary, you have pissed me off for the last time.”   
  
“I’ve heard that at least a thousand times over the past five years. Get a better ominous threat!”

 

The creature in the attic turns to you. “They’re back,” he says, as if it wasn’t obvious. “You’re safe. For now.” He then grabs you by the forearm, lets the stairs down again, and drags you behind him to the living room  on all fours . 

 

“Lys, who the fuck is that?” Someone says. She’s tall and has on a T-shirt with a very interesting design. You recognize the top half of the figure as a character from some video game that came out in the late 2010s. The bottom half looks like it was taken from a stock photo of… A man in an adult diaper. Interesting, and a bit sickening.

 

“This little bastard came into our house while y’all were gone. Just fucking broke and entered. Can you believe that? Their name is (Y/N). I vote we throw them into the ocean.”

 

“Big fucking agree,” the person from the photo with the ice cream pipes up. He is lying flat on his back on one of the couches.

 

Lys pushes you forward. “Out the door you go,” he says. He motions for everyone to follow him. The horde of weird gay people chases you down the street and onto the beach. You run out onto a pier. The last thing you feel is a hard shove on your back, and the last thing you see is the bright blue ocean hurtling closer and closer to your face.

_ Fin. _

 


End file.
